Meet Jessica Gomes, The Person Who Says “Maybach Music”

One side effect of listening to Rick Ross’s mixtape and likely his album is that you’re going to hear the words “Maybach Music” a lot. Enough times that if you’ve heard the album even once in full, or even just a few scattered singles, you can probably imitate the cadence yourself: “Maybach Music!” (It doesn’t work quite so well in typography.) Maybe you even know the full Australian-accented exchange from the track with the same name. What you likely didn’t know, unless you’re few enough degrees removed from Rick Ross that you really shouldn’t need the Internet for music news, is whose voice it was that you heard over and over. The voice belongs to Jessica Gomes, an Australian supermodel who’s appeared in Sports Illustrated and elsewhere. OK, Rick Ross using a model’s voice for his drop isn’t really surprising, but what might be somewhat less expected is the fact that her voice was candid, as she told XXL:

It happened back in 2008. I was hanging out with some friends that were friends of Rick [Ross] and Jay. We were just hanging out, playing pool, listening to the music in a studio in New York and they were like, ‘I think you should say this on the song.’ It was an intro. I was with another friend and she says, ‘What is this?’ and I say, ‘Maybach Music’ and she says, ‘I like this Maybach Music’ and then we both go, ‘Sweeeet!’ and both laugh. We’re both Australian, so we have an accent. They’ve used the intro for all their songs. I didn’t even know that it was going to be like this. It was a little conversation at the beginning of the song. It was just having fun. In the beginning I was even like, ‘Are you sure that’s me?’

XXL goes on to answer the most pressing of the questions prompted by that quote: no, she’s never talked to Rick Ross since; no, she doesn’t get paid; yes, somehow these two words “add a new dimension to [her] personality” somehow (maybe if resume items count as personality dimensions?); yes, she knows who fellow Australian beneficiary of rap buzz Iggy Azalea is. Boom: one of the most ubiquitous-yet-unidentified mp3 clips on someone’s studio hard drive: now identified, and your trivia quotient for the day: now filled.